Columbus Dispatch...
Dean talks ethics today, but damage from 1972 is lasting
By Joe Hallett
Sunday August 21, 2011 

You never know what you can trust from a man like John Dean. 

He is, after all, a convicted felon who did prison time for his role in the Watergate cover-up nearly 40 years ago. He pleaded to one count of obstruction of justice in exchange for becoming a witness for the Watergate prosecution. 

At the time, the FBI called him the “master manipulator of the cover-up” that led to the 1974 resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. 

Dean blew Watergate wide open when he testified before a Senate committee that Nixon was involved in the cover-up. Even though Dean was telling the truth, many viewed him as a traitor, someone who squealed to save his skin. 

Joseph Alsop, a leading newspaper columnist of the day, called Dean “a bottom-dwelling slug.”& amp; amp; lt; /p> 

Those epithets largely had been forgotten when Dean showed up in Columbus Wednesday to make a four-hour presentation on the ethical lessons of Watergate to the Ohio State Bar Association’s continuing-legal-education classes. Somewhere, Nixon must be blanching at the notion of John Dean teaching ethics. 

I met with Dean for a fascinating walk through olden times. Now 72, he looks fit and dashing, having prospered as an investment banker, author and lecturer since his days as White House counsel. 

How, I asked, did Watergate change you? 

“I had hair, and it wasn’t gray,” he joked. “It was a maturing experience, that’s the real short answer.” 

Would you have preferred Watergate had never been part of your life? 

“I would have rather been a spectator than a participant. In the long and short of it, it didn’t change my life at all. I pretty much ended up doing what I planned to do.” 

That seemed like an answer Dean might have given Nixon in the Oval Office as they covered up the June 17, 1972, break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building. 

From the outside, it appears that Dean’s life not only was changed by the scandal, but it also was defined by it. 

Another assertion by Dean seemed convenient all these years later. He said that if today’s ethical requirements for lawyers had been in place in 1972, the Watergate cover-up might not have happened. Under rules now requiring lawyers to report ongoing illegal activity and to resign when a client refuses to stop criminal activity, he said he would have had leverage to refuse to do what Nixon wanted. 

You worked for the most powerful man in the world, one you deeply admired, and you are depicted by some as a lawyer who told his client what he wanted to hear, I asserted. If a lawyer is inherently unethical, rules don’t matter. 

Dean didn’t flinch: “I don’t think Nixon really wanted to hear me say (Watergate) was a cancer on his presidency,” a reference to the famous March 21, 1973, Oval Office conversation in which Dean was trying to tell Nixon it was time to end the cover-up. 

Besides, he added, rather than holding attorney-client privilege sacrosanct, as he did when advising Nixon, today’s ethical standards would have made crystal clear where his true obligation belonged. 

“I thought Richard Nixon was my client. He wasn’t my client. I worked for the office of the president. There’s a big difference. There’s going to be lots of presidents. There’s only one office of the presidency.” 

At the behest of his publisher, Dean and a team of five are transcribing the roughly 1,600 Nixon taped conversations that have not been transcribed. When finished, Dean said, he should be able to “ follow the entire thread of Nixon’s thinking.” 

Dean said “there is zero evidence” that Nixon knew in advance about the break-in. Taped conversations he recently listened to from days after the break-in, he said, reveal the breadth of information withheld from Nixon by trusted aides. 

“He’s making decisions that are going to affect the way it’s all going to shake out that first week on minimal and often less-than-accurate information.” 

John Dean was party to the deception. Our trust in the presidency never recovered. 

Read it at the Columbus Dispatch